The closest I can find is

https://www.ghacks.net/2024/10/01/mozillas-massive-lapse-in-judgement-causes-clash-with-ublock-origin-developer/

Which is only the “lite” version (which really has no reason to be used in firefox) and was likely based on an improper scan. Which happens constantly and is usually an email and a few days of waiting rather than immediately going to the press.

If you can find something about Mozilla actually being anti-adblock or disabling manifest v2 that would be incredibly useful. But maybe be aware of what is going on before vaguely making major claims?

The thing is? Ignoring the apparent void that black skin creates on all cameras (oy), it doesn’t take much time. It takes computing power.

As poops and giggles a few friends and I took the public (rumble…) traffic camera feeds that a nearby county has online. Set up a simple python script to scrape those and then configured an off the shelf tool to track a buddy’s general car (green hatchback) and told him to just drive around for an hour.

We were able to map his route with about 70% accuracy with about two hours of scripting and reading documentation. And there are companies that provide MUCH better products for the people who have access to the direct feeds and all the cameras we don’t have access to.

I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don’t have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.

But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those “traffic” cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn’t Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.

Rhetorical question (because we clearly can infer the answer) but… have you ever seen a black person?

A bit of melanin does not make you into some giant void that breaks all cameras. Black folk aren’t doing long exposure shots for selfies or group photos. Believe it or not but RDCWorld doesn’t need to use nightvision cameras to film a skit.

Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn’t racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.

There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there… until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don’t really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.

No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software…).

Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.

But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how “difficult” black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but…).

For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.

For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.

I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.

And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).

Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.

Well… unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.

And they change nothing? It still boils down to human beings being liable.

Hosting costs money. Theoretically (some) cryptocurrency can obfuscate that but… there is a reason graph problems got really popular again for a little bit.

But domain names also cost money. They also need to be registered to a person/company.

That is why a lot of torrent sites end up getting their domain stolen.

Also, all of this ignores the actual developers. But that is par for the course when it comes to discussing liability with open source projects.

Yeah. It is why I really like that Proton basically say "We will turn on you in an instant if we get a legal order. But here is what we’ll actually turn over and here is how you can minimize your vulnerability to that.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

Plenty of hosts and providers over the years have claimed to be super privacy oriented and blah blah blah. Once they get a legal request, they roll over. Because they aren’t going to prison for the customer anymore than they are going to prison for you.

Nope.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

What is the alternative?

Closed source “I swear this executable that will let you play all the games you want is legit” hosted on sourceforge or random websites that get hugged to death every day that ends in a y?

Also: it isn’t like that would stop this kind of legal action. MS/Github are barely a factor. It is the devs themselves getting the “hey, stop it or we’ll turn you into indentured servants” letters.

I mean… everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.

Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders’ money.

People tried that.

reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.

Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.

We live in a world where everything you do or say on the internet is potentially part of someone else’s training data. Lemmy is already a shitshow for that but you can bet that “ooh, piracy board” is fair game for everyone because nobody would be dumb enough to sue about that.

If someone wants to delete a comment for ANY reason, they are more than welcome to.

Agree that the macbook IS the “future” (really present), same as it was with phones, because a single monolithic SOC is much easier to manufacture and has massive power and energy benefits. That said, I do like that “new” PCAMM2 format since it does wonders for making even those kinds of systems upgradable… to the extent you would upgrade.

And a macbook with a lot less glue and signed parts is kind of what I think we SHOULD be striving for.

That said, gonna nitpick a bit

Having a highly configurable machine is the opposite of the MacBook. There’s probably a market for the Framework laptop. It fully leans into being configurable and repairable.

Again, define “configurable” and “repairable” because the former is buying dongles and the latter is not too dissimilar from other (non-apple) laptops on the market

That gives the user a bigger sense of control. They don’t feel dependent on huge corporations.

Ah, so we are paying the security blanket tax. Farmework makes me feel warm and fuzzy so I should give them money?

It’s not just a feeling either. Other companies don’t want their customers to repair or exchange anything on their laptops and will void the warranty if you do it. Framework is the opposite as it encourages their customers to assemble and replace parts themselves.

Again, actually check out the landscape. Apple are fucking assholes and always will be. But when even frigging Microsoft is making fairly repairable devices (lots of glue but https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+4+Screen+Replacement/60348 )?

Mostly it sounds like you are reading that marketing schpiel I alluded to. “Companies aren’t your friends and all want to fuck you in the ass. Except Framework. We are your friends”

Customization has become huge in the PC market, especially among gamers. Framework is smart to try and fill this individualist niche. The marketing works well, just like you said. I find the programmable LED modules quite charming for example.

Probably the biggest thing that happened to PC gaming specifically in the past decade is the Steam Deck. Which is a minimally customizable handheld computer

The option to buy the laptop as a kit for me to assemble myself also sounds fun.

And good for you. Personally, I would rather do my zany projects with random crap I got off ebay or build some gunpla. But… I am not going to tempt fate by saying I would never even consider buying a 1k USD model kit.

Empowerment is what the marketing sells to their customers. Few people really need this product, but many find it desirable.

On that I 100% agree. I just… wouldn’t call that a positive.

Lemmy is an outlier where anything “AI” immediately triggers the luddites to scream and rant (and occasionally send threats over PMs…) that it is bad because it is “AI” and so forth. So… massive grain of salt.

Speaking as (for simplicity’s sake) a software engineer who wears both a coder and a manager hat?

“AI” is incredibly useful for charlie work. Back in the day you would hire an intern or entry level staff to write your unit tests and documentation and utility functions. But, for well over a decade now, documentation and even many unit tests can be auto-generated by scripts for vim or plugins for an IDE. They aren’t necessarily great but… the stuff that Fred in Accounting’s son wrote was pretty dogshit too.

What LLMs+RAG do is step that up a few notches. You still aren’t going to have them write the critical path code. But you can farm off a LOT more charlie work to the point where you just need to do the equivalent of review an MR that came from a plugin rather than a kid who thinks we don’t know he reeks of weed.

And… that is good and bad. Good in that it means smaller companies/teams are capable of much bigger projects. And bad because it means a lot fewer entry level jobs to teach people how to code.

So that is the manager/mentor perspective. Let’s dig a bit deeper on your example:

I dont like Bash because of its, dare I say weird syntax but it made the most sense for my purpose so I chose it. Also I have not written anything of this complexity before in Bash, just a bunch of commands in multiple seperate lines so that I dont have to type those one after another. But this one required many rather advanced features. I was not motivated to learn Bash, I just wanted to put my idea into action.

I did start with internet search. But guides I found were lacking. I could not find how to pass values into the function and return from a function easily, or removing trailing slash from directory path or how to loop over array or how to catch errors that occured in previous command or how to seperate letter and number from a string, etc.

Honestly? That sounds to me like foundational issues. You already articulated what you need but you wanted to find an all in one guide rather than googing “bash function input example” or “bash function return example” or “strip trailing strash from directory path linux” and so forth. Also, I am pretty sure I very regularly find a guide that covers every one of those questions except for string processing every time I forget the syntax to a for loop in bash and need to google it.

And THAT is the problem with relying on these tools. I know plenty of people who fundamentally can’t write documentation because their IDE has always generated (completely worthless) doxygen for them. And it sounds like you don’t know how to self-educate on how to solve a problem.

Which is why, generally speaking:

I still prefer to offload the charlie work to newbies because it helps them learn (and it lets me justify their paycheck). And usually what I do is tell them I want to “walk you through our SDLC. it is kind of annoying” to watch over their shoulder and make sure they CAN do this by hand. Then… whatever. I don’t care if they pass everything through whatever our IT/Cybersecurity departments deem legit.

Which… personally? I generally still prefer “dumb” scripts to generate the boilerplate for myself. And when I do ask chatgpt or a “local” setup: I ask general questions. I don’t paste our codebase in. I say “Hey chatgpt, give me an example of setting the number of replicas of a pod based upon specific metrics collected with prometheus”. And I adapt that. Partially to make sure I understand what we are adding to our codebase and mostly because I still don’t trust those companies with my codebase and prompts. Which… is probably going to mean moving away from VSCode within the next year (yay Copilot) but… yeah.

I strongly encourage taking a look through ifixit’s website as a surprising number of laptops these days are repairable in that regard. I mean, I was doing a quick google to get an example of a laptop they have a guide on and was shocked to see fricking Microsoft Surface screens of alll things are front and center in their webstore.

As for customizability? I can definitely see use cases for that and there have been times I questioned just how much I would be willing to pay to get a headset jack on a modern laptop. But I very much agree with Wendell’s joke over at Level1Techs that those mostly exist for him to get bored during a meeting and disassemble his laptop. After the initial configuration you are unlikely to really touch them ever again (outside of niche cases).

And… years ago I learned the glory that is USB hubs. Dongles sucked. But even a 20 dollar anker hub/dongle turns one USB C hub into 4 As, an ethernet port, an audio jack, and an ethernet port. Having a dongle/hub dangling out is a bit annoying (but honestly a closer match to me plugging it in at my work desk) but… I don’t think it is 250 USD annoying.

Like I said, conceptually I love the concept of Framework but every time I math out what they actually bring to the table… yeah. And it increasingly feels like there is a strong marketing campaign (can’t imagine which investor contributed to that…) to misrepresent the modern day laptop market.

I will say that the best argument I have seen is that the “real” usb c ports are recessed and only accessed through the Totally Not Dongles. Which means it is a lot harder to break/bend a port that would require soldering to repair. I… don’t know if I agree that is a 250 USD feature and have concerns over the implications of the design on the mobo but that is the kind of thing that would be nice for more vendors to adopt. Even if the ports themselves aren’t “modular”, but just to have an easily swapped board/module in the event someone drops their laptop on a thumb drive a hundred times.